Dear Jonas, I think you should divide the problem in two sub-problems: * the way to structure the information; * the way to show it on the web site.
On what concerns the structure, there is an interesting experiment published by Kevin Larson and Mary Czerwinski: they explain that breadth structures are more usable than depth ones. A 8x8 structure, for instance, allows you to categorise as many as 64 items, and with a 8x8x8 structure the count goes up to 512. I therefore suggest you to organize your structure more in breadth than in depth, if this is possible. The second aspect is the navigation interface. My first suggestion is to show, in home page, the full first and second level. In an experiment made by my research group (unfortunately it's published only in Italian) we found that showing not only the actual level but also one level deeper increases the information scent and allows the user to skip a step in finding the item she is interested in. The same approach could be adopted at the Category pages of the first level (i.e. Services, Products ...) showing the second and the third level of it's branch. On what concerns the item pages (SubService Item 2.2.1), if you choose the horizontal navigation, the solution suggested by Anand is particulary clever: a row for each structure level. Finally, to show the surfers where they are, you could use the Breadcrumbs design pattern: http://www.welie.com/patterns/showPattern.php?patternID=crumbs http://ui-patterns.com/pattern/Breadcrumbs Stefano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48638 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
